


and every song’s about you

by zenstrike



Series: you’re lucky that’s what i like [25]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Falling In Love, M/M, Smitten Keith (Voltron), Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 18:27:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17027772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: Three times Keith fell.





	and every song’s about you

**Author's Note:**

> for two anons on tumblr, one who asked for soft klance and the other who asked when keith and lance fell in love.
> 
> (there’ll be a lance part, soon)
> 
> in a strange mirror of That One Strawberry Story ahem part one is pre-klance; part two is December of their first-year; and part three is klance late in their second-year

    After the strawberry incident—well, maybe he just wanted an excuse or two to look at Lance. The blue was starting to fade away from his hair and every day Keith became a little more amazed at how light and brown and fluffy and soft Lance’s hair seemed. Lance looked good in sweaters, in his favourite oversized jacket, in his battered sneakers with the loose shoelaces that always made Keith think Lance’s shoes were about to fall off. Lance bounded through res: their floor, the downstairs cafeteria, the dining area proper. He talked with his hands. He talked—loud. He brightened a room and drew people to him and sometimes Keith felt like he was trying to dig in his heels against the natural pull Lance exerted on everyone.

    Everyone.

    Lance went on first dates with no less than three girls with very long ponytails. He’d flash bright smiles at them and wave them through doors and come back to his and Keith’s dorm room sighing hugely.

    Lance was friends with everyone— _everyone_ —on the floor. He was the only one who seemed to be able to make Hunk comfortable in a crowded room. They went everywhere together.

    And Lance was even, sometimes, kind of, a little nice to Keith. Even if it was grumbled observations that Keith should eat something, or sleep a little, or that one time Lance slid an ice pack onto Keith’s desk when Keith bruised up his right wrist in practice.

    So Keith had a little crush on his roommate. No big deal. He was still functional. Nothing bad was going to happen if he spent a little bit of every day looking at Lance, with his bright eyes and his wide smile and his _hands_ —

    But he was on the phone with Shiro the day it all became a little too much. The day his little, bubbling, flustered crush became a swoop in his stomach and an ache in his hands.

    Nothing happened, really.

    He was sitting on one of the lobby couches, listening to Shiro break something in the kitchen while repeatedly assuring Keith that he was “fine” and repeatedly ignoring Keith saying “bullshit.” Halfway in a daydream that he was back home, with Shiro within arm’s reach and his own bed just down the hall, Keith leaned back on the squeaky couch normally reserved for visiting parents and prospective students, and he turned his head towards the noisy entrance to the downstairs cafeteria and its beckoning smell of donuts and coffee and snacks. Shiro said something in his ear about Pidge and Keith was halfway to listening and then he spotted Lance.

    Lance, who was so tall and long and energetic, rocking on the balls of his feet with his hands in his coat pockets and his smile so wide the fluorescent overhead lights seemed dim. He was looking at something on one of the too-large bulletin boards and maybe humming to himself—Keith imagined he was. Lance seemed musical to him. Like bells rang with his footsteps and like his laughter could be the soundtrack for the start of the universe and Keith wondered, maybe for the first time, what it would be like to kiss Lance.

    He wanted that. Maybe just once. Or a thousand times, if he could convince Lance that them kissing wouldn’t be a terrible idea. He wanted to take Lance’s hand and walk across campus and listen to Lance tell him something, anything, and he wanted to push his hands through Lance’s hair and tell Lance that his eyes were beautiful and his hands were gorgeous and his voice made Keith feel vaguely sick in the best kind of way.

    “Keith?” came Shiro’s voice.

    And Keith dropped his phone and Lance turned his head and looked at him and Keith scrambled to scoop his phone back up and run away.

    “What’s going on?” Shiro asked.

    “Nothing,” Keith breathed and managed not to fall on his face and managed not to swear at the heavens when he burst outside.

    “What are you doing?”

    “Nothing!”

   

***

 

    They went for a walk.

Lance banged on Hunk’s door until Hunk opened it and pinched him, and then Lance made his somber way to Keith and Keith managed not to laugh.

    “He says he doesn’t want to come,” Lance grumbled.

    “I got that.”

    They spent fifteen minutes on a bus, their shoulders bumping and Lance seeming to lean ever so gently against Keith. Lance beamed when Keith took his hand and beamed some more when Keith didn’t let go when they got off at their stop and all that did a great job of shooing away some of Keith’s final-exam-stresses. He knew, now, what it was like to fall asleep together; what it was like to have Lance reach for him and hold onto him and pull him in for a tight hug or to bump up against him and dig his chin into Keith’s shoulder; what it was like to have Lance’s back against his chest and Lance’s hands on his knees while they watched a movie or dozed or just talked together with Red hamstering her way around her little home. Keith knew that Lance was a warmth that could melt away the worst of his stress and his fears, when Keith let him.

    They walked through the edge of a neighbourhood, crossed a busy road with Lance chanting: “we’re gonna die.” And the park opened up wide before them, seeming out of place in the bustling city and with the cars roaring behind them. Keith could hear a dog barking, somewhere far away. Snow soaked into his shoes.

    “Which path should we take?” Lance asked, leaning towards Keith with his eyes wide like he had taken a bit of the huge, prairie sky and stuck them in his skull. “We could go along the fence.”

    “It’ll be loud,” Keith said. “Let’s just...go this way.”

    He tugged Lance along one of the worn, packed-snow paths. They passed a parking lot and Lance grinned at a pair of dogs wrestling while their humans locked up and zipped up their coats.

    The wind was a little harsher, now. A little colder. But the day was warm and sunny and bright.

    “I’ll never get used to this,” Keith mumbled.

    “Huh?”

    “It’s December,” Keith said with a stilted gesture of his free hand. “And we can see grass.”

    “And you want knee-high snow, do you?”

    “I don’t know if I _want_ that, but—”

    Lance laughed and squeezed his hand and Keith grinned at his feet as they made the slow climb up one of the hills. They were quiet for a time, just holding onto each other and breathing together. The sky was huge and blue above them, seeming to arc down and encompass everything. The noise from the road started to fade. Keith stopped thinking, for a bit, about exams and about Christmas and about what being away from Lance would be like.

    A dog rushed between them from behind and Lance stumbled away, laughing. The dog skidded to a stop, its ears bouncing, and looked at them. It wagged its tail.

    “Hi,” Lance said to it with a wave.

    The dog bounded back towards them and licked their hands and burst away again and was gone. Keith snatched back Lance’s hand and they carried on, Lance’s smile impossibly wider.

    “I love dogs,” Lance said eventually.

    “Me too.”

    “Good.”

    They looked at each other, and then away, and Keith thought that there was something special about smiling together and for each other.

    They crested the hill. Lance kicked through some snow and grass and pulled away from Keith. Keith shoved his hands in his pockets and watched him go, his eyes drifting from Lance’s back to the line of the mountains, so far away and so huge all at once, beyond the city skyline. They could see a little of the university from here. They could see, even, their residence, with its distinctive three buildings and the stretch of trees behind it.

    “They look close,” Lance said.

    Keith blinked. “What?”

    “The mountains.”

    “Oh.” He shuffled closer, his shoes crunching through the snow and his toes aching with cold. He hunched deeper in his jacket. The wind rustled his hair and made his cheeks burn.

    And Lance turned around and smiled at him again and Keith forgot, just for a moment, to breathe. He wanted a picture. He wanted a thousand pictures. He wanted to capture this image of Lance, all bright-eyed and cheery even with stress and exhaustion making the corners of his eyes seem heavy. Lance with the mountains the sky and the city behind him. Lance looking huge and small all at once.

    “We should go,” Keith said, his chest tight.

    Lance nodded and turned, just a little, to look back over the park and the wind made his hair dance and Keith watched his hands twitch at his sides and he felt that familiar but forever disarming swoop in his belly.

    _I love you_ , he thought. _I love everything about you_.

    But the words froze on his tongue and slithered back down his throat, just waiting for him to digest them. Understand them.

    And he felt very young and very worn and very awake. Lance hooked their arms together when Keith was close enough and they continued walking and Keith tried to imagine what it would feel like to tell Lance—

 

***

 

    “What?”

    “A hammock.”

    “...what?”

    Lance twisted in his chair to roll his eyes at Keith. The little pile of mismatched library books, all crafty-looking with pictures of smiling people in knit whatevers beaming up at Keith, looked ridiculous at his elbow.

    “A _hammock_ ,” Lance said again, enunciating. He rolled his eyes again.

    “But why?”

    “Because I love her,” Lance said simply and twisted away. “Because she deserves to be comfortable. Because summer is coming and she needs to be happy and dozing.”

    “She spends the whole day dozing,” Keith said, feeling a little desperate. “She’s a hamster.”

    “And she shall have a hammock.”

    Keith sighed and slipped into the seat next to Lance. Lance dragged one of the floppy craft books over and set it between them. Keith watched him flip through the glossy pages, the pages creaking every now and then, and Lance humming the whole way through.

    “What if she gets tangled up?”

    “In the hammock?”

    “Yes, Lance. In the hammock.”

    Lance frowned. “She won’t. She’s not dumb.”

    “She’s a hamster!”

    “I’m making her a hammock!”

    “How?”

    Lance gestured to his pile of books. “Hence the research.”

    Keith leaned one elbow against the table, holding his head in his hand and trying not to sigh again. “Okay,” he said eventually. “You realize the internet’s a thing, yeah?”

    “I don’t want to hear that from you, arts student.”

    Keith coughed a laugh. Lance flipped the book shut and pushed it away and reached for another from the pile.

    “She’s going to be so happy,” Lance sighed. “I can see it! A cozy little hamster in a cozy little hammock, crafted with love by her dear father.”

    “Oh my god, Lance.”

    “You like it,” Lance retorted. “You can see it, too. I know you, Keith.”

    “Tell me the truth,” Keith said. “Are you procrastinating?”

    “I’m expressing my love, you jerk.”

    “Right.”

    Lance flipped open the next book, leaning over it and beaming at the pages and Keith had the suspicion he didn’t have a clue what he was really looking for. Lance probably had the thought and got excited and rushed to the library and grabbed books off the shelf with his smile wide and his imagining running wild. Keith also suspected that Red would have her hammock within the week.

    Lance would coo. He’d scoop her up and set her in the hammock and swing her gently and take a thousand pictures of her and say something like “ _Look_ , Keith.” And Keith would look.

    Lance flipped a page, dragging his fingers along the pictures. Lance was so good with Red. Lance was so good with Hunk, with his niece and nephew, with Keith. Lance was—loving and smart and hard-working and handsome. Sometimes, Keith imagined he could spend all his days just watching Lance be _Lance_.

    Yeah. All of them.

    Lance in the morning and Lance in the evening and Lance when a new idea seized him and Lance making dinner and Lance talking on the phone and Lance asleep on the couch and Lance groaning his way through a hangover.

    “I’m a good dad,” Lance said, tapping the book and sighing dreamily. “She’s going to love it.”

    And Keith thought: Lance was going to be a great dad, one day.

    And something warm swooped and dropped in his belly and it felt like wanting. An aching, desperate, bright-eyed wanting.

    “Lance,” he said while his heart tried to climb up his throat.

    Lance hummed.

    “Do you want kids?”

    Lance paused. He lifted his head and frowned at their kitchen window. He looked at Keith. “Yeah,” he said. “I think so.”

    “Good,” Keith said.

    “Good,” Lance repeated.

    They watched each other for a moment, and then Lance twitched and looked away but his smile came back slowly and Keith studied his profile for just a moment more.

    He thought they’d have flowers, at their wedding. Flowers and light and rain—he’d bring rain for Lance. He’d marry Lance in the rain and he’d marry Lance on the moon and he’d marry Lance—

    Keith stood, maybe too quickly because Lance looked up at him, blinking.

    “You okay?” Lance said.

    And Keith was not but he said: “Yeah.” And he left the kitchen and he took a long, long shower and tried to eat his rising panic and his stupid, _stupid_ daydreams.

    Lance burst in eventually and yelled something about yarn and Keith loved him so much he thought he’d faint.

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from “i want you” by mø which has made its way onto my list of klance anthems lmao
> 
> red’s hammock was brought to you by the incredible csmithman and NikAdair.
> 
> thank you as always for the comments and the encouragement aldkfjalsdfjf

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I just want to fold you up and keep you warm](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17446946) by [csmithman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/csmithman/pseuds/csmithman)




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